The Hellcat Was Built to Kill the Zero — It Won Nearly 19 to 1

The Hellcat could not turn with a Zero, so the Americans stopped trying. On 19 June 1944, Grumman's F6F Hellcats destroyed more than 350 Japanese aircraft over the Philippine Sea for the loss of about thirty, and across the war they were credited with 5,163 victories against 270 air-to-air losses. The Imperial Japanese Navy would never again send a trained carrier air group into a fair fight. This documentary follows the Grumman F6F Hellcat against the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, from the Bethpage drawing board of 1938 to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. It covers the April 1942 switch to the Pratt and Whitney R-2800 engine, the Akutan Zero recovered in the Aleutians, the first combat with VF-9 and USS Essex, Tarawa, Task Force 58 under Mitscher, and the Japanese Mobile Fleet under Ozawa. It also tests the popular claim that the Hellcat was built to kill the Zero, and shows what the dates actually say. Every figure comes from after-action reports, loss tables, aircraft production records and squadron histories, and we state clearly where a number is a wartime claim and where it is a count. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War — new documentaries every few days.